I Love My Dyslexic Brain

Ms. Jong-Fast is a contributing Opinion writer.

I was 8 years old when I was asked to leave the fancy private school where my aunt had been a teacher. It was a bit of irony; the daughter and granddaughter of writers couldn’t read.

It didn’t matter how many flash cards I studied. It didn’t matter how many sessions I had with the reading tutor. None of it mattered: The letters didn’t match the sounds. As hard as I tried, my brain just couldn’t make sense of the data.